Microsoft ends digitzation project for books, journals
Tiny URL: http://tinyurl.com/6acz88
Through a blog post announcement, Satya Nadella Senior Vice president search, portal and advertising for Microsoft today informed that Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and their sites will be taken down next week. Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes.
Microsoft had started this project in a reactive response to Google’s Books Library Project but seems to be calling quits to the effort and instead aims to index book and journal content hosted by publishers.
Satya noted that - “Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries. With our investments, the technology to create these repositories is now available at lower costs for those with the commercial interest or public mandate to digitize book content. We will continue to track the evolution of the industry and evaluate future opportunities.”
With Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, Microsoft had digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. Microsoft will provide publishers access to the digital copies of their scanned books and make the scanning equipment available to our digitization partners and libraries to continue digitization programs.
